You’re a rookie homicide detective, called to investigate a complaint at a nearby apartment. Solve a decades-old mystery and catch a killer before he takes another life. Created by Gear Worx Productions (@GWPGearWorx), this prologue chapter (dubbed “Apartment 202”) is a small sample of an upcoming game series, focused on Slade’s quest to uncover the details of his sister’s mysterious death.

“Apartment 202 was was the first ever game I designed from the ground up to incorporate a new hardware device,” says Gear Work CEO Steve Adamson. “I honestly never heard of the Leap Motion Controller until someone posted on Facebook about the 3D Jam. This has honestly taught me a lot about integrating a new API. Next up, VR!” You can dive deeper down the rabbit hole and try the first full-length David Slade Mysteries game, Memories Of The Past, at www.davidslademysteries.com.

What if crime scene investigators had the power to look through time? In Highbury Demo, you can rewind and fast-forward through time to discover and investigate clues that will lead you to the solution. It was created by game developer Puya Dadgar, who has worked on different PC, mobile, and AAA console games for more than a decade.

In this VR puzzle game, you rotate a shape to fit into a grid of cubes. Kaiyuan Ping is a 19-year-old indie developer and Sword Art Online fan who got hooked on virtual reality after seeing demos like ElementL: Ghost Story at Unity 2015.

In this tiny experimental game, you must “earn your hands” over time by building a set of hand skills. Move around in a dark playfield lit by real-time lighting, and play around with hand interactions on micro- and macro-levels. By directing rays of light, you can solve puzzles that would be impossible in real life.

Rayhands creator Peter Thor (@peterthor_se) lives in Sweden with his wife and two kids. By day, he’s the CTO of Omnifinity, a company creating a solution for navigation in VR. He’s also CEO of his AR and VR software consultancy, Vicator. “Being an engineer by profession I have since childhood been fascinated by computers and creation of hard and soft artifacts using programming. I look upon coding almost as an art form that helps me to unleash creativity and stress.”

“Rayhands emerged close to the end of the Jam in which I sought to prototype some interaction schemes I’ve had in mind for a puzzle game. I seeked a way of manipulating objects in close and far vicinity at the same time and settled for the concept seen in the contribution with different skills attached to your left and right hand.”

From Graffiti 3D creator Scott Kuehnert (@jscottkuehnert), Superstruct is an art game that combines drawing in 3D and first-person movement to allow users to explore the landscapes of their creations. Discover new ways to move your vehicle to the end goal platforms – there are as many as you can imagine! Players can scale up to the size of mountains and draw skyscraper-sized strokes or down to the size of an ant and draw tiny details. Every stroke becomes a tangible part of the world that can be interacted with via your vehicle.

“I love experimenting with virtual and augmented reality technologies because I think they’re some of the most versatile media ever created,” says Scott, “and their rules and uses are still up in the air. Exciting possibilities and applications are discovered daily, and it seems like we’re still scratching the surface of the potential for these technologies.”

“One thing I learned this year is that subtle details break usability in VR, and tutorials are not easy to get right. I initially had players start in vehicle view, and I found that they were disoriented by the sparseness of external details in the simple maps featured in Superstruct. It took players a moment to understand where they were, what they were looking at, etc. However, when I started players in draw mode, they seemed much more comfortable with the setting and got the interactions much quicker. They could overview the map and have expectations about what they would see in vehicle mode before shrinking down to move around, and nobody I tested it with reported feeling disoriented.”

The abandoned room in the old hostel holds many mysteries. Who lived there? How can you turn on the TV? What’s the deal with the tribal masks on the wall? Decipher all the puzzles to unlock the safe sitting on the bed before the clock runs out.

TRoM:CoTM was written and directed by a pair of programmers, @HalamaDariusz and @FilipLoster. They used open source 3D models to create a claustrophobic “lock in” experience. “We had a ton of fun while making this game, including times when our disembodied hands of destruction were flying around the scene. We sincerely hope that you, dear player, will enjoy it as well.”